thefncrow

1. The Witcher 3: I really, really enjoyed The Witcher 3. I've long ago left behind the idea of doing everything in these big open-world RPGs, but I did damn near 100% of The Witcher 3. The writing is impressive, the Bloody Baron stuff is an incredible Act 1, and the game closed strong. There's a ton of monster hunting quests that at least have some sort of story element to them. There is an impressive size to everything in this game, and the game looks gorgeous on PC. There have been some times I just had to stop and stare at the way the trees in the forest were blowing as the sky grew black and a storm was about to start. It's a game I put 100 hours into, and I regret none of the time I spent with it. A fantastic experience I cannot recommend highly enough. 2. Her Story: There is something really powerful in Her Story. The total non-linear construction of the story, letting you fill in the details for yourself, is a powerful thing. And the writing for that game is very strong, when you take into account that the search engine means that every word is meaningful. Because you have a section that you'd like to conceal for at least some period starting the game, you have to think about the actual dialogue in those videos and all the important words. What words would get someone into this dialogue without hitting the 5 result limiter? What common search terms need to be in those speeches and so need to show up past the 5 result limiter? It's a staggering undertaking from this angle, and Her Story pulls it off magnificently. The FMV work really works to sell the older time period, and Viva Seifert gives an incredible performance in a big spot where a bad performance could have cost the game everything. 3. Ori and the Blind Forest: Ori always looked gorgeous, but I was skeptical going in. I feel like there is always this certain type of cutesy platformer that looks gorgeous and just feels right, but is also not all that challenging. I had kinda slotted Ori into this category, and boy was I wrong. The combat is very simplified, but that's because the platforming can be actually challenging. Ori uses enemies in platforming in a way I don't think I've seen any game do before. The game smartly adjusts for this by giving you total control over where you are checkpointed to. My biggest gripe about the game is that the game features a small number of boss areas that contain collectables in them. Should you miss any of these collectables while traversing the area for the first time, you are locked out, as the areas change when you complete them and are left inaccessible. Also, along this line, when you beat the game, your save is complete. No going back into the world to clean up anything you missed after the game's finale. 4. Rocket League: Rocket League spent most of my summer as my Witcher cleanser. Every time I wanted to play something but didn't have time to get into Witcher, I was playing Rocket League. The feel of that game is just incredible. 5. Splatoon: Who knew that the best shooter of the year would be a Nintendo game? The short round length means the game has that same appeal as Rocket League, of just one more game. 6. Super Mario Maker: I did not play as much Mario Maker as I need to, but this still ranks. I'm always a tourist in these games, because I'm coming to them for the levels that other people make, but there's still plenty to enjoy here, and I've even tried to put together a few ideas from time to time, giving the editor way more of a shot than I usually would. 7. Olli Olli 2: I played the hell out of Olli Olli in 2014, and was very excited when I saw this pop up. There is just a feel to how Olli Olli plays that is top notch, and Olli Olli 2 extends that with a few more tricks and manuals for extending your combos. Here's a spot where I have to caveat: I played both Olli Olli games on my Vita. The Vita doesn't have any of the input lag you might get from using a modern HDTV. What feels precise and sharp on the Vita feels kinda mushy on the PS4. Which is a shame, because Olli Olli 2 is really fun when it hits right. 8, Cibele: Cibele is a great example of how games can use mechanics that are not fun in and of themselves to invoke a mindset. The MMO portions of Cibele are really rote from the perspective of wanting to engage mechanically with a game, but they do a good job of putting you in the mindspace that you're sitting in front of your PC kinda wandering through whatever task has been put before you in this MMO. It's the right mindspace for all the conversations that you focus on while mostly idly clicking around. It feels in the same vein as Cart Life pushing you to the point of mechanical overload to replicate that feeling of just barely keeping your head above water from poverty. 9. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain: The first 20-30 hours of this felt amazing. The music works well, the gameplay is top notch, and everything just feels compelling. By the time I finished Part 1, I felt kinda done with the game. At some point in part 2, I went from wanting to finish the game to kinda feeling obligated to just finish it out and be done with it. And about 20 hours after that, I was. Y'know how I said I didn't regret any of my time with The Witcher 3? I regret spending as much time as I did on MGSV after finishing it. Quiet has the potential for an actual cool character, but so much work was done to make the camera angles maximally gross when she's present and those fucking rain and shower scenes do her such a disservice, and Kojima can't help but head back to the Gross Tropes about Women bargain bin when it comes to the finale of her story. This is a flawed-ass game, but even at the end of my time with that game, the base infiltration gameplay was still exciting. 10. Fallout 4: This game is probably badly hurt by timing. It's a big time-consuming open-world game in a year where I played 3 other games in that vein before it. There are clearly some improvements in the writing from the companion relationships, but this in many ways feels like more Fallout. Which is good and bad, but good enough that it stays on this list. A few items I nearly used to replace Fallout 4: Axiom Verge - Very early on, it seems like Axiom Verge is just trying to be another Metroid. It sets that expectation, and then starts to branch out in ways that defy that expectation. It has some really cool glitch effects and has a really strong pixel-art style. However, it started to run out of steam for me near the end of the game. And this ran into when I got The Witcher 3 and kinda didn't look back. Every so often, I get the urge to finish it, but it's been so long and I'm so near the end of that game that I am probably going to have to start over if I ever want to finish this. Amplitude - This technically doesn't come out until 2016, but screw it. I paid for one of the higher Kickstarter tiers for Amplitude and got it 2 days before Christmas, and it's just more Amplitude. The music's good enough and has a bit of variety, the gameplay feel is perfect and I'm happy as shit with what I've got. But it's not much more than just more Amplitude (which is enough for me). Hacknet - I have not played enough Hacknet to justify knocking off any of these other games. But I loved Uplink and this makes me think of how Uplink made me feel while also incorporating a command line element to the game that does so much to improve immersion in the much the same way that Cibele and Her Story use the desktop simulation. And for my list of things I feel ashamed that I didn't get to this year: Rise of the Tomb Raider (I have an Xbox One, but I'd rather play this on PC) Undertale Life is Strange Tales from the Borderlands Read Only Memories Grow Home Westerado: Double Barreled

There's a comment on the Day 3 podcast post on their site where someone gives timecodes for the beginning of discussion of specific games, as well as for the categories as a whole. So if you just want to skip that bit to avoid hearing that stuff, you could use those to skip past it.

It wasn't a Christmas gift, but along the lines of the Dark Forces installation nightmares, I had something similar. There was some PC Gaming expo here back in, I'd have to say it was 1995 or so? I feel like there was an early version of Win95 there that Microsoft was advertising, so 95 sounds right. I'm there, and one of the games that had a booth was Crusader: No Remorse. They had some kiosks set up, and I played a few minutes and was totally sold. So much so that my mom took us from the expo over to Best Buy so we could buy the game. And I've got that game in my hands, when I notice the requirements printed on the box: 8MB of RAM. My machine had 4MB. I was crushed. Then one of the employees at the Best Buy is like "hey, don't worry, we also sell this!" and points out to me a piece of RAM doubler software. So, awesome, my mom buys me the game and the RAM doubler, and everything's good, right? Of course not, because those RAM doublers are a total nightmare and don't really make you able to play 8MB required games on 4MB. I managed to get Crusader installed and try to load it, and it just stays on this loading screen. It's animating, so my machine hasn't hard locked, but this is the worst loading time ever. For reference, I tried to load this game up on a Sunday night, and by the time I went to bed, like 3 hours after I tried to start the game, it still hasn't loaded. So I left it on. And came back Monday after school, and the game had loaded. I then tried to start a new game, which went into a new loading screen. I got past that screen when I came back from school on Tuesday. I left that game running for several days straight, before I finally gave up on it. But I did manage to play a couple levels of that game, where I'd finish a level and then just leave the game loading the next level, which I figured I could start back up on the following day.

So, to generalize so I can at least provide something about Hateful Eight without spoilers, I'm thinking of giving it another watch alone at home. Because the more I think of it, I could see this, but it's hard to argue from this angle when I was watching it with the audience I saw it with. That audience seemed to be truly terrible, like having a bunch of people just fucking guffaw every time someone drops an N-word (which, with that movie, is often). Maybe you're right about that movie being an audience critique, but if it was, the audience I saw it with was definitely treating it as a fun romp and that makes everything that made me feel gross feel 1000 times grosser.

So I watched The Hateful Eight tonight. And man, am I down on that movie. I can't overcome how gross (and not in terms of gore, although there's plenty of that too) it is in general. There's some elements to it that I could recognize as good, but, man, they are overshadowed in a huge way by other stuff. And here's some more text to pad out this opening so that I can keep this spoiler out of the post preview. Need some more length here to keep this safe. (Minor plot spoiler) And things go downhill from there. This next thing is a major plot spoiler, and even the trigger warnings I want to give are kinda spoilery. So, trigger warnings: Ugh.

Jack and Coke is definitely a regular thing. Fun fact: the sugar in the Coke slows down your absorption of the whiskey. If you don't want to slow down the alcohol absorption and would rather get drunk faster, mix it with diet soda instead.

I'm so glad Jeff eventually said something about them referring to AC:Syndicate as just Syndicate. Every time someone would say "I want to play some more Syndicate", my brain would immediately go to "MAN, so would I, that game was so good and multiplayer is just so dead" before I realized they were talking about an Assassin's Creed game and not the Starbreeze Syndicate game from a few years ago. Fuck, that game was so fun.

You don't really have to "paint" Gamergate as puppy-kicking cartoon villains, they do a good job presenting themselves as such. Describing their actual behavior shouldn't be toned down just because they conduct themselves in a manner that can sound cartoonishly evil.

There was some interview with Roland Emmerich where he talked about what happened with Will Smith. He was on board for being in the new movie back in the early stages, where the sequel was very much a Will Smith movie focusing on him and his son from the first movie. Then Will Smith did After Earth, which also was a sci-fi movie focusing on a father-son dynamic, and after that he decided he wasn't interested in doing the Independence Day sequel.

Those flat bottom hard shells are a really good idea. They improve the architectural problem of regular hard shells, and the screwy bit where you have to take a half bite of the bottom and a half bite of the top of the taco in order to get the full experience, since the bottom part is all meat and the top part is all cheese/lettuce/tomato/other stuff and no meat.

Also put me down for Gamergate being very much about political ideas. I think people who are gators desperately want to avoid that reputation, but that's out of the same nature as no one wants to be called a racist. The problem in modern society with being called a racist is not because people have an actual understanding of the harm of racism, but because of the more simplistic "racists are bad". Therefore since I'm not bad, people shouldn't call me a racist, no matter what racist bullshit I may be saying. Similarly, gators know from long exposure to the net that the label "conservative" sucks, and they (believe they) don't suck, so they're not a conservative movement despite their words and deeds.

The story, as I recall, is that people had been asking KT on social media about it being released in the US, and they'd respond that it wasn't coming. In one case, someone followed up with something like "why not?" and actually got a response, which was: That comment has since been deleted. That is the basis for all of this.

Who said deserve comes into it? If Bethesda wants to keep that stuff secret, handling security is Bethesda's responsibility. If that security is breached, that sucks for them. If they can track down the leaker, then they have legal agreements they can use to punish the person responsible and make an example out of them for anyone else considering violating their agreement. But if that information gets out to people with no duty to keep it secret, that's just too bad for Bethesda. Bethesda wants to keep their games in development secret. I want a billion dollars. Neither of us are owed significant assistance from outside unrelated parties to ensure we succeed in our goal.

I still feel real dumb that I didn't see the Live from Quakecon panel, since I live in Dallas. I overslept that morning and wrote it off, figuring it'd be busy, and between that and trying to get there on time, I was probably better off just watching the stream. Then the stream started and I realized immediately I should have just gone.

So, if you want to do that, the arc that really gets into what the show is about is the last one, issues 22-28 or so.Also, there's a fair bit of changes to the story. The show's version kinda hits the general beats from the comics, but Jessica's history in the comics leans on the old age of the Marvel Universe in a way that the show can't. This is from having watched the first 6 episodes of the show, so maybe this changes.

To clarify, when I was complaining about the MaxFun ads, it's not anything about the style of ad reads on the network, but about those 30-45 second ads for other MaxFun shows they drop in the middle of episodes and/or the end of the podcast. They are almost uniformly awful. I remember actually hearing a MBMBAM ad on one of the other shows, and it struck me how the ad would turn me off from listening to a show that I actually enjoy had I not heard their show before I heard that ad. Earwolf is doing those style of ads now too, but I feel like they're doing it smarter even though the ads are actually longer. They have the host do a short intro, and then stick a short interesting clip from the show on the end of it.

You're discounting the possibility that the leaker thought this was important information, and Kotaku went "Nah, not really, but there is something interesting here to report on". Like, if you want to talk scenarios, what you're excluding is something like a No Mutants Allowed regular ends up in a place to get information about Fallout 4 and sends it over to Kotaku saying "You have to read this! I guess Bethesda thought they didn't shit enough on Fallout making F3, and look what they're doing now!" Kotaku's not obliged to accept and print the leaker's point of view in accepting and publishing the information. If the information checks out as credible, and the organization perceives there to be value in running with the information they were provided, they run it and don't have to talk about how their source was maybe a bit unhinged in their appreciation for the pre-Bethesda iterations of the series. If they can establish who leaked it, they can use the contractual language in their contracts to make a case against the leaker. And if the actual script pages have been posted, then they can have a lawyer draft a letter asserting ownership over the script and demand it be taken down. But 1) that confirms the leak, because you have to admit it's yours to demand it come down, and 2) it doesn't stop any outlet from discussing the contents of the script, just from them posting the actual script. And I could even add 3) this is the internet age, and so nothing can really be taken off the internet for good, so getting someone to pull down a scanned page from a script isn't going to make it disappear. That is the extent of how far their claim to the script goes. It protects the script itself, but doesn't apply to people talking about the content of the script unless they've signed legal documents saying they won't. (EDIT: For removing inadvertant smiley and adding important qualifier)

I have tried The Flop House and it has never clicked. And it's not like I don't like those style of podcasts, because I listen to How Did This Get Made, but it just doesn't work for me. And the really shit MaxFun ads for it aren't helping that at all. (Actually, in general, the ads for MaxFun podcasts suck and generally make me less interested in listening to those shows.) Also, the race arc was great. It was kinda like the show took a month or so to turn into Mad Max: Fury Road with magic.

Yeah, I was kinda questioning the same thing when I was reading this on my phone somewhere, and started to do some research before something in real life demanded my attention and I didn't end up coming back to it. It's just that the pre-op/post-op verbiage implies that genital surgery is a major milestone for all trans people, when the decision on whether to have such a surgery is very much an individual one and not something that should be assumed that anyone must be planning to undergo. My gut feeling (which could be totally wrong, and I will appreciate a correction if I'm being a jerk) would be that you avoid mentioning anything about a trans person's genitals unless the circumstances absolutely warrant it (which the question described does sound like). If you do need to mention it, you can just say that the person "has not had genital surgery" or the other way around. Outside of certain academic or medical settings, it's probably not something that needs to have shorthand like "pre-op"/"post-op".

Been watching W/ Bob And David on Netflix, and man, it's kinda surprising to me how good this is. Even if it's also depressing that it's also a bunch of old dudes and also Paul F. Tompkins and Jay Johnston.

Some better news from the SXSW situation. SXSW pushed the Gamergate panel out so that it's not part of the anti-harassment event, and so now the original anti-harassment panel has confirmed that they will attend.

It's a panel comprised of Gamergaters. And SXSW decided that it should be hosted inside of an anti-harassment summit. For what reason, who fucking knows. Actually, sadly, the reason why is because they still haven't gotten it through their thick skulls that this isn't two sides having a debate but one party abusing another group who wants nothing to do with the first set.

SXSW has announced that the full-day anti-harassment thing is happening. However, they also announced that the Gamergate panel is back on and part of the all-day event. Which seems like a real bad idea, like holding an event on cancer prevention and awareness and then giving the tobacco companies a spot to hawk their products during it. They're not part of the solution, they're part of the problem. EDIT: Also, Randi Harper is on Twitter saying that the anti-harassment panel isn't confirmed for this thing because of safety concerns over the inclusion of the GG panel. I'm being more and more convinced by that Leigh Alexander article.

I've been having complicated thoughts about this since yesterday, and can't coherently get together what I'd like to say. But I do want to say that this did put a new spin on and kinda damper my initial enthusiasm to the SXSW announcenent. I actually just erased a big post where I was writing something that disagreed to an extent and, in writing the thing out, talked myself a little more into what Leigh Alexander wrote. That's a good piece. I also want to post that Slate has a piece from Caroline Sinders, one of the panelists on the cancelled Level Up panel, talking about her experience with talking to SXSW staff as the panel selection process was ongoing. She makes a particularly good point I hadn't thought about regarding the importance of having SXSW-provided moderators for the panel.

It's a rumor still at this point, but there's an article that suggests a shockingly positive outcome from all this SXSW stuff. Basically, the rumor is SXSW will reinstate the panel about online harassment as part of a full-day event regarding the problems of online harassment. It also somewhat suggests that the Gamergate panel may stay dead. We'll see if that pans out, but it's actually a way better reaction than I thought they would come up with.